So 2062 after reallocation?
Yes, I thought it was clear from context that I was discussing projects to complete in early 2062, that's correct.
At one point, everyone thought the same of the Navy when it came to Karachi.
Karachi is much bigger relative to the scale of the Navy than a single Red Zone Offensive would be relative to the scale of ZOCOM.
Among other things, because a Red Zone Offensive
by definition takes place closer to the support of GDI's other combat arms than
anything else ZOCOM ever does.
Remember, we've been getting constant warnings in the narrative about the war effort of how the Navy is desperately overstrained and Nod is getting hits through in a big way because of our naval weakness.
We have
NOT been getting similar hints or warnings about ZOCOM.
I wouldn't even consider a
major program of expanded Red Zone operations without ZOCOM-supporting actions, but a
minor program of doing
one testbed action seems less problematic to me.
Q4 2060 Plan Draft:
INFRASTRUCTURE 6/6 95R
-[] Yellow Zone Fortress Towns (Phase 6) 112/300 3 dice 60R 95%
-[] Blue Zone Arcologies (Stage 4) 1/650 1 die 15R (med 1/8)
-[] Blue Zone Apartment Complexes (Phase 2) 28/160 2 dice 20R 89%
I infer that the idea here is to commit to a gradual arcology build by putting in one die and giving a sense of investment/commitment towards continuing to do so in future turns, while relying mainly on apartment construction to keep Housing numbers out in the face of the impending refugee expansion?
Personally I want to keep pushing railroads for one more turn because we've been told that logistics and supplies to our forces forward-deployed in the Green Zone are an an issue. And since I'm
hoping we can get some more territory expansion (necessary if we wish to turn it Blue) out of this last turn of Steel Vanguard, that becomes important. The housing issue
is an issue, but our buffer is thick enough that one more turn won't matter if we can get through to the formal end of Steel Vanguard and major offensives, at which point we're no longer spending several dice per turn on such projects.
HEAVY INDUSTRY 5/5 + 1 140R
-[] Continuous Cycle Fusion Plants (Phase 7) 153/300 2 dice 40R 74%
-[] Suzuka Prototype Hover Chassis Factory 0/175 2 dice 40R 50%
-[] Isolinear Chip Foundry Anadyr 0/320 1 die 50R (median 1/4)
-[] Crystal Beam Industrial Laser Development: 0/80 1 die 10R 70%
...
Most notably, I'm pivoting away from completing Nuuk 4 this Plan in favour of banging out the Anadyr Isolinear chip fab while we've still got the resources to do it - it's either now or we need to spend another 3 years building the budget back up.
Given that we're only looking at thirteen dice for
Nuuk Phase 4, it's not a strict either-or proposition if we're willing to spend Free dice in a serious manner, and we should be. One more turn to rebuild budget income also makes expensive HI projects a lot more practicable.
On which note, if we have Anadyr
nearly finished, scraping together 50-100 R for 1-2 dice to finish it in 2062-63 is probably going to be a lot easier than scraping together 200 R for four dice in the same period.
...Not a fan of relying on spider cotton for Capital Goods when we have an impending population boom and when the legislature clearly
wants us to expand food storage
LIGHT/CHEMICAL INDUSTRY 5/5 105R
-[] Chemical Fertilizer Plants (Phase 2) 94/300 3 dice 45R 74%
-[] Bergen Superconductor Foundry (Phase 1+2) 71/285 2 dice 60R 13%
Since there may not be a third phase of
Fertilizer Plants, I would like to argue for flipping the third die on fertilizers to the cheaper
Drone Factories action. No point in overkill.
ORBITAL 6/6 + 1 + Erewhon 160R
-[] GDSS Enterprise (Phase 5) 102/1535 Erewhon (1 die) 20R
-[] Lunar Rare Metals Harvesting (Phase 1+2) 0/285 3 dice 60R 22%
-[] Lunar Regolith Harvesting (Phase 2) 50/320 1 die 20R (1/3.5 median)
-[] Lunar Heavy Metals Mines (Phase 3) 217/375 3 dice 60R 96%
I would argue that it is a bad idea to prioritize this way. Putting three dice on
Heavy Metals means a better-than-even chance of overkill. With dice scarce, that's a problem. It would be better to commit the extra die to
Regolith or even
Enterprise Phase 5.
Okay? I was talking about the next four year plan. I don't think we even have the option for the next gen vehicles right now
Almost very single one of our main combat vehicles is at the end of it's useful operational lifespan. More upgrades won't help until we build a new base vehicle and over the next 4 year plan we will need to get as many of them out as possible, as quickly as possible. This is not instead of zone armour, it's in addition to zone armour. For example, the new IFV will be specifically designed to carry zone armoured soldiers.
Okay, but I want to have a fairly strict prioritization of doing Thing One first and Thing Two second. Ground Force will want
at least the first and probably second wave of their zone armor production done
before we start developing vehicles, and each vehicle development project is going to need considerable factory construction.
Personally, my sequence looks like this:
1) Ground Force Zone Armor (wave one, possibly wave two factories)
2) Most obsolete vehicle replacements (new APC, Mammoth tank upgrades)
3) Less obsolete vehicle replacements (probable hovercar replacement for the Bulldog, Paladin tank)
I don't think the revision is going to knock off any factories. To me it reads more that if we do the revision then the factories are going to include the new suits as well or in place of regular ZA and that it's something Ground Forces would probably also really like done/benefit from even if it's a ZOCOM project.
I'd also say that doing the revision is less going for perfection and more just adding a little tweak before serial production.
Perfection would be getting drones and the backpack rocket launcher, which I do want but can wait.
Okay, that's a language issue on my part. I am using "to knock out" as slang for "to rapidly build, perhaps in a suboptimal but acceptable manner." In this case, I mean to
quickly complete 1-2 of the planned wave of six factories, accepting that they will be
suboptimal (that is, more expensive), in the interests of getting them done more quickly and not psyching ourselves out of building the things for months because we never seem to find the right time to do the Defender project or other upgrades to the power armor.
It does say cheaper. Although we don't know for sure that the GFs are using the Defender model. But since GFs are who I'd expect to be 'second and third line forces', I'd say it will.
Actually... um. We've been told how this works.
Wave One of the zone armor factories only equip a relative minority of Ground Forces in "spearhead" formations. Presumably, Waves Two and Three are
even larger. There will be a total of three or four waves.
I am definitely an advocate of doing the Defender refit before trying to complete even the Wave One factory set, let alone Waves Two and Three.
But I also think it might be worthwhile to just
hurry up and do one or two of the damn factories instead of worrying about it any longer, then
yes, do the Defender refit anyway and proceed on that basis.
Agriculture 4/4 40R
[] Wadmalaw Kudzu Plantations (Phase 3) 56/450 4 dice 40R 8%
Tiberium 8/7 130R
-[] Yellow Zone Tiberium Harvesting (Phase 10) 174/350 3 dice 60R 99%
-[] Intensification of Green Zone Harvesting (Stage 6+7) 46/200 2 dice 30R 82%
-[] Railgun Harvester Factory (Porto) 44/70 1 AdminDice 10R 90%
-[] Railgun Harvester Factories (Bissau) 0/70 1 dice 10R 85%
-[] Liquid Tiberium Power Cell Deployment (Phase 1) 41/140 1 dice 20R 56%
Orbital 9/6 175R
-[] Advanced Materials Bay 0/400 3 dice 60R 0%
-[] Lunar Rare Metals Harvesting (Phase 1+2) 0/285 3 dice 60R 22%
-[] Lunar Heavy Metals Mines (Phase 3) 217/375 2 dice 40R 60%
-[] Outer System Survey Probes 0/190 1 Erewhon Dice 15R 0%
I would be
MUCH more comfortable postponing any decisions about the
Enterprise bay options until we've actually finished our Plan commitments for the turn.
Liquid tiberium power is deeply controversial, we need to conserve and increase Political Support, and we
don't need the +Energy this turn.
And the kudzu plantations are probably a bad idea when we have a large but indefinite wave of refugees greatly increasing demand for food. We want to at least have reasonably realistic numbers for what the refugee wave will do to our food requirements
first,
THEN we have some breathing room for the caffeinated kudzu.
Bureaucracy 4/4
-[] Administrative Assistance 2 die auto
-[] Security Reviews: DC50 1 die 90%,
-[] Security Reviews
A one-die review on Bureaucracy seems questionable, and I'm not sure the AA die for Porto is even really needed by comparison.
Your not looking at it from the strategic level. We had a certain number of actions we could take in railline expansion before the war started and we completed those. But now that we have gained all this territory we have unlocked all of these new rail line expansion actions. Notice they only came into being when our green zones butted up against the red zones? That was when we gained these 3 new actions. When three of our green zones made contact with their respective red zones.
To me it is crystal clear that we are going to need to complete a rail expansion for every new red zone farm we set up. At least for the cheap and highly effective income that we are hoping for. So we will want to complete all of our rail expansions before the end of this 4 year plan so we can then invest all of our tiberium dice into the lucrative red zone actions they unlock. We will still only be able to acquire 3 of those farms even if we do that though.
I just hope that the income from them allows us to quickly recover quickly into the next 4 year plan.
You're not looking at it from the strategic level.
Each rail line expansion action we've taken so far represented a
global Initiative-wide push to extend numerous separate rail lines forward to and past the forward edge of the (pre-Steel Vanguard) Green Zones and into the (pre-Steel Vanguard) Yellow Zones that the advance of Ground Forces has turned Green.
In the places where the Green Zones are now in contact with the Red Zones, it is because our Steel Vanguard pushes,
presumably supported by railroad expansion, just as they were everywhere else, have driven forward to the edge of the Red Zone. Therefore, it is entirely possible that in these specific areas, railroad lines have already been advanced. Not to the edge of the Red Zones, to be sure, but
closer than they were before.
Furthermore, not every centimeter of railroad we build is classified under a "rail expansion" project. Construction of giant factory complexes like Nuuk or Johannesburg implies and requires some construction of rail spurs to service them. The ICS port expansions probably included some minor rail spur expansions. New major factories, refineries, and so on? Rail spurs to serve them- sidings, et cetera.
Yellow Zone harvesting expansions involve building lots of tiberium mining operations all over the Yellow and Green Zones. Do you think those expansions
don't require railroad lines to support them? And yet, that gets funded under the 'Tiberium' category and is not gated behind more railroads.
Until and unless
@Ithillid tells us that Red Zone Offensives are gated behind more railroad construction phases, it would be premature to assume that they must be- that is, that the scale of railroad expansion required is so large that it cannot be covered under "just build a few new sidings and spurs connected to the existing network, which is reasonably close by already."
We only spent the first two years of this Plan trying to prepare for Karachi.
